I'm thinking of buying Lexar's firewire (1394) compact flash card reader and am curious if anyone out there has any hands on experience. I've seen another brand that is also for firewire, but I don't remember who makes it.

Apple has decided to support firewire rather than USB 2.0 (for technical reasons irrelevant to this forum). Since I use a Mac and want something faster than the USB 1 that my coolpix supports, I'm looking at firewire.

hi.. i have the UNITY mdcf-fw(firewire) by datafab works fine with type 1 or 2 cards. seems to be faster transfer that my d7i though usb. and saves connecting the digicam. bought it at ebay for $19.00usd. steve's got a good review on it....

I've been using the Lexar firewire reader for a while now and I swear by it MUCH faster than USB or through camera cable, plus it's great for iBook owners who resent the fact Apple neglected to put a PCMCIA port on iBooks. Now if only they'd make the reader as small and modular as the Zio USB readers... just a stuby thing hanging out of the firewire port or attach an extension cable to it...

I use both USB (1.1) and firewire on my iBook and my PC desktop, both are similarly "legacy" technologies that have been and will be succeeded. USB 2.0 has reached 480Mbps, and what of IEEE-1394b with 800Mbps (with 1.6 - 3.2Gbps specifications to folow)? But none of that matters since the flash memory is the real bottleneck in all of this. Computers are all tools, so long as it gets the job done in the time you want it to, it's all good